Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Tuesday, May 11, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Freddy Vs. Jason meets Ecks Vs. Sever! I'm sure it's been said 75 million times already, but damn is this user upgrade to blogger ug-lee!I have, with some regret, uninstalled Avant Browser. Although I loved a lot of features Avant Browser had (yay! No pop-ups), a good number of them actually came from having the google toolbar built in. Although AB still had it once the Google toolbar was removed, I found it to be a bit of a system hog and I couldn't turn off its predilection for checking on boot for a new version of AB. To top it off, the guy who created AvantBrowser (Anderson, uh, Che?, I think) upgrades the thing every friggin' week. Finally, the prospect of having a "blog this!" button that worked was just too tempting. I really appreciated being able to one-click stuff for review later, and missed t a lot in the last couple weeks (now I can go through some of the links I had emailed to myself and dig up the info). My only concern with all of this is I'm now totally Google's whore. I search on Google, I blog through Google. I've got the fuggin' Google toolbar. Plus, I have one of those beta googlemail accounts which I've been using to handle all my mailing list emails for the last week. This is after I stopped using dictionary sites because I found out you can just type "define:[word you know but can never really remember what it means, exactly, like 'vituperative']" and Google will give you a list of definitions. And there was this helpful article in the S.F. Chronicle that shows you how to look up phone numbers, use reverse phone numbers, calculate functions, and check flight info on Google. I give it two years before I can type tax:[SSN] and it will do my taxes for me. And yet, as is the way with lovely, lovely capitalism, although it waits on me hand and foot, Google is not my whore. I am now its whore. It knows where I search. It knows who I email and what I email them about. It knows what interests me enough to put on my blogs, and it will take all this information to sell my ass like a two-dollar whore to slavering advertisers. Will it be such a bad world when I am able to open my browser and see discreet pastel ad boxes offering to sell me old Jack Kirby comics and Sonny Chiba DVDs? Well, "bad" isn't really the right word, so I guess my answer is no. It will be, however, a more compromised world, a less diverse world, a more pleasant, well-run, quietly fascist world. How does that John Cale quote go from the end of Watchmen? "It will be a stronger, loving world for us to die in"? (And yes, in case you're wondering, I searched in Google to try and find the quote--God help me!) posted by Jeff Lester | 10:23 PM | |
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